Saturday, May 07, 2011

I'm a conflict theorist, which necessarily makes me a Marxist of some sort, but class conflict explains far more than structuralist theories simply because self-interest rules the day. In my, somewhat informed opinion, at least. Reality is that the macrotheories don't work completely and sometimes one must be discarded in favor of the other simply because the other is more correct. Geek moment: Rodney just had a stroke. There are plenty of functionalists that disagree with me on self-interest, but really, the whole tending toward equalibrium thing just seems to strike me as apologist for inequality. Note to self: no reading social theory until comps are finished. I mean it.

Politically, I'm a libertarian. Probably. I'd be an anarchist, but we are not ready for anarchy. Montana proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. They allowed anarchy on their highway system and people decided the Montana highway system was a race track and they were expert racers rather than actually used judgment to travel at speeds that were appropriate for vehicle, conditions, and driver. And this is a state with signs that say "warning, free range for X miles." It would be unpleasant to discover cows on the road at 130 mph. So Montana had to re-impose law to tell people how to drive safely. I am neither conservative nor liberal. I want minimal encroachment of law. Conservatives want laws to restrict ability to choose, such as illegal drugs. Liberals want laws to restrict ability to choose, such as gun control. The only difference between a liberal and a conservative is which part of human behavior they want to control through legislation. Our government, every single part of it, does not trust us to make our own decisions. Every year, they tighten the leash. Big Brother is now Nanny. Orwell has to be shaking his head from his fluffy cloud and harp playing at how wrong he got that.

"Left" and "right" are an unnecessary binary. We've all been socialized to think that there are only left and right on the political spectrum because that's the only way to think of things. Well, we've added moderates to that, but they're either conservative-moderate or liberal-moderate. Considering all the labels we're applying to political beliefs these days, the left-right thing isn't really working. Ironically, the French Revolution and its aftermath are where these terms originated. The Assemblymen that wanted order and to maintain the monarchy assembled on the right side of the king. The Assemblymen that wanted to limit the king's power and become a true republic sat on the left side of the king. Conservatives (those who wanted to conserve monarchy and maintain traditional ways) were reported in the international press as "the right" and Liberals (republicans) were called "the left" by the international press. Left and right have altered over time, but the basic meaning is that the left wants change and the right wants things to stay the same. It's also why American conservatives are neo-liberals. Not a one would want a monarchy, and more importantly, they've traditionally been interested in a balance of power between the states and federal government--the philosophy of the original liberals. Ironically, American liberals want the federal government to have most of the power and the states to administer federal programs. The whole thing is fairly ridiculous. They all want the same thing---a prosperous nation where the citizenry has opportunity to flourish---but don't have any way of agreeing on how to do that. But then again, we hire people who are fully unqualified for the job. They tend to be steeped in political science, law, or some form of economics, but none of these things really gives them the qualifications necessary to understand, for example, the impact of free trade on the American people. At least not like these hirelings think they can. Economists think they do because it's economic theory, but they were unable to predict outsourcing. I find this amusing in a very painful way. Economists aren't actually economists. All they know is in-depth, capitalist theory. They don't have a clue what non-capitalist economic theory is, let alone how to work with it. But the US is capitalist, we all cry in dismay. We're globalizing capitalists in a big, broad world full of non-capitalists. We want to blend economies with China (GM was very unhappy when the Chery Spark started production a month after GM hit China up for cheap labor and, coincidentally, had to show design plans to the Chinese government). And we all think capitalism is all we need to know because that's all there is? It is to laugh.

It's all muck up there, left and right. It wouldn't be so bad if a single one of them could step back and say, even if just to themselves, that they aren't actually qualified to make these decisions because no one is. Armed with the knowledge that they don't know what's best, they can approach their jobs with critical thought instead of uncritical belief in the power of their own opinion.

I would like to take this moment to state that I universally despise the elected persons from my state. They're a series of patronizing morons, except for the woman. She's a sycophantic idiot that likes to act as if she's doing something with real thinking involved rather than rubber-stamping the partyline. A more ineffective person must exist, but he or she likely shares space on the floor of Congress with my state's sycophant. They can form a club with buttons, bumper stickers, and posters: "All my thinking is done for me at party headquarters!"

Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Hobbesian ideology is one of those things. It's mentioned at a mutter, accompanied by nodding grunts of yes-of-course wisdom by sychophants. Of course mankind is a vicious brutal species. Of course mankind will degenerate into violent in-fighting in absence of a strong leader to keep the lot of us in line. Of course we're all just one civilizing step away from some savage version of might makes right. We've all read Lord of the Flies. We know what happens when people are suddenly isolated from the confines of rules and an enforcement body.

That particular bill of goods is made entirely of iron pyrite. What do politicians sell? Fear, of course. If you believe them, the world is a pack of snarling dogs ready to rip the corpse of America into shreds. Our neighbors are rabid with teenaged deliquency, recreational drug manufacture and distribution, sexual predators, serial killers, and insurance salesmen. Watch out, they might get you. No one is safe. The only ones that can make us safe are the people who legislate tough on crime stanes, and enforce them. The people who legislate security measures that stop terrorists in their tracks---you can tell that it's successful, no terrorists on airplanes, though some lovely shots of people viewed with x-ray vision are now internet fodder.

Most of these things are manufactured terrors. Most kids aren't molested by strangers. They're molested by someone they know, someone the parents let into the house, usually a relative. Sexual predator laws? Pointless overkill. There's only one way to stop sexual recidivism and that's not by making registries and treating people as evil long after they've paid their debt to society. Castrate them. Whoops. Can't do that, violation of civil rights! But we'll make it so you have no place to live, have no means of supporting yourself, and so that everyone, everywhere, whether they meet your or not, knows that you're a social outcast.

It's stupid, really. A poor person steals 1,000 dollars or a mid-priced automobile and gets 5 to 10 in prison. Stockbrokers in Brooks Brothers or Armani steal millions of dollars, put large numbers of people back into the work force---bye bye retirement fund, you'll never get it back, they jetted to Monaco for a weekend and drank three sips of champagne that would have paid your mortgage for three months---and what do they get? 5 years, minimum security country club, eligible for parole in 1 year with good behavior, and some legal wrangling that shunts whatever is left over from the fraud and theft into lawyer pockets.

Ideology is interesting. The poor kid in a hoodie and baggy jeans is a threat to society. He's already got one foot in Lord of the Flies and the only thing keeping him from total savagery are reality cop shows. The rich kid, though, he's civilized. Why should anyone fear him? He's well groomed and polite. Laws are one way for the dominant ideology to reproduce itself over and over, generation after generation, enshrining the savage poor and genteel rich into fact. And with that newly minted fact, we agree that those no-account hoodlums should get five times the punishment for a millionth of the crime.

Social contract theory, the very ideals that our democracy is founded on, contradicts Hobbes, even though he's one of the first people to write about it. People agree to be led. They agree to follow the rules. They agree that this is the way things are. Wealthy people only have wealth because everyone agrees that all of their stuff means they're wealthy. Laws only work because everyone agrees there are laws and, for those that break them, everyone else agrees that some people have the right to enforce those laws. We don't have a Leviathan in office, we have a meek man that can't lead. Yet here we are, still agreeing that he's the president anyway and that he's got the right to exercise the power of that office. We haven't turned on our neighbors and ripped them to pieces. Life is not "nasty, brutish, and short" until a real Leviathan rises to keep the lot of us in line. We all pretty much agree that unless Trump or Palin get the GOP nom, Obama has almost no chance at a second term.